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SSL support in your site, and therefore, in your CDN is critical but it is also incredibly expensive. In this article, I'll show you how to save a fortune while improving the performance and security of your site.

It used to be that sites only encrypted the most sensitive traffic with their customers, i.e. registration, login, checkout, etc. In 2010, the Firesheep extension made it very clear that this is not enough.

Since then, many other attacks on partially encrypted sites have been devised and so major sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others have all switched to HTTPS by default, aka Always On SSL. Last year, Google called for HTTPS everywhere and later, announced that secured sites will get boosts in PageRank.

January 08, 2015 performance

The ball hit the net but from which side. Can you tell? Over the past three years, companies have pushed themselves to the cloud for many reasons but have they landed in the wrong side of the net?

Many companies have mistaken moving to the cloud for a goal to be achieved and it is natural to make that mistake. Companies see the bottom line, that building services in PAAS or IAAS clouds lowers the costs of bootstrapping risky projects, speeds up time to market and enables greater flexibility. They naturally make moving everything to the cloud a business target.

They miss that driving these benefits are the ways that automation and infrastructure as a service force the modernization and industrialization of a company's IT teams and processes. Even if a company isn't using any modern software driven deployment techniques, it is the industrialization of infrastructure on the provider's side that allows a "machine" to be spec'ed, purchased, racked, cabled, and installed at the push of a button or the call of an API. It is this change in the way that IT works that is improving the bottom line, speeding time to market and increasing the business agility.

January 07, 2015 thoughts

I had an idea. That's always how it starts. Before I know it, I've purchased the domain name and I'm futzing around with some HTML but where am I going to host it and how much is this going to end up costing me?

That's where I was when I came up with#DonateMyFee. "This is a site that is only going to cost me money", I thought to myself (the whole point is for people to donate money rather than paying me). I really didn't want to start shelling out big (or small) bucks on hosting.

Long story short, here is the recipe for a screaming fast website on a low budget:

December 31, 2014 tutorial

Some of you may know that our daughter, Hadar, was born visually impaired. She is very nearsighted in a way that cannot be corrected with glasses and, as a result, her childhood has been very different from that of her older brothers. What normal children learn naturally from their environment passes outsideher field of vision. We had to learn quickly to adapt and that's how we found ELIYA.

November 30, 2014 personal

Oracle announced their new line of Sun SPARC T3 powered servers at Oracle Openworld 2010. The SPARC T3 processor includes several improvements on T2 and T2+ processors including:

It is interesting to note that the T2 processor was only used in single socket systems. The T2+ processor removed the T2's on board 10 GbE ports and other components to make room for the SMP glue. With the T3 processors, the 10 GbE ports have returned and the chip has built in glueless support for 4 way servers.

All in all they have packed more T-Series goodness in a smaller package but I'm not making goo-goo eyes yet.

October 16, 2010 review